My name is Daniel Arenas, I live in Canada but I have lived in Mexico and the United States as well. I have a couple of degrees in computer sciences and I work as a systems analyst. Currently I am pursuing a business degree at Grant MacEwan college in Edmonton Alberta. The degree is a Bachelor in International Business and Supply Chain Management. The training I am receiving fits my professional goals; I decided to pursue this degree instead of an MBA because I found most MBA programs too academic, too expensive, and more focused on getting good reviews from magazines than on teaching marketable skills.

My current experience is focused on information technology. I hold a certification in the new Microsoft .NET technology and had the opportunity of participating in a couple of .NET projects recently. My experience has been mainly in middle-ware, with the use of class libraries and database programming. I have limited HTML front-end development exposure but easily I can catch up with it if necessary. Also I have extensive experience in Client/Server development using Powerbuilder, and database and network administration. Please take a look at my resume for more information.

After several years of experience in the IT field, my career objective now is to participate better in the integration of technology in the business environment. I think that nowadays IT workers have to have formal business training to be capable of making bottom-line contributions in the projects where they are participating. Gone are the times when one could be a project champion just by mastering a class library or making complicated UML diagrams explaining up to the last detail the business process the client was using.

Right now I have the personal project of summarizing all the original documentation of SAP, the market leader Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) system. I want to make an easy-to-read, business-oriented, IT-understandable, and supply chain oriented summary of the product. SAP, as other ERP systems, deals with all and every organization units of a company. SAP implements “best business practices” to standardize the product into many organizations. Sometimes this does not work because for some organization their business process is their competitive advantage. For those cases SAP can either be customized or discarded. There the advantage of knowing SAP well is that you can borrow ideas from them when proposing solutions to clients.

Finally I would like to invite you to participate in my SAP project. The idea is to learn about business, the supply chain, and to learn how SAP has succeeded selling its business solutions. After all, companies are willing to pay million of dollars to have SAP running.

Daniel Arenas